writing that on Sam's Town, the band "ditch[es] their cheerfully fake Bowie moves and try to get heavy by copying Bruce Springsteen. Yes, that means glockenspiel solos. Yes, it means anthems about the road and looking for America and girls named Mary. No, it's not a good move." In later years, the album gained a cult following and has been critically lauded as a classic and one of the best rock albums of the 2000s. Despite its two-star rating by Rolling Stone, Sam's Town was voted by the magazine's readers in December 2009 as the most underrated album of the decade. Q magazine ranked it as the 11th best album of the 21st century. In a retrospective for Uproxx, Steven Hyden broaches the issue of pannings by notable media outlets such as Rolling Stone, arguing that these pannings have ultimately cemented the album's status as a classic: "Ten years removed from its original moment, Sam's Town has aged as all misunderstood sorta-classics do, where its deficiencies are now strengths. [...] A record that was risible to some because its attendant hype was so overbearing now has the appeal of a mistreated underdog. Against all odds, the narrative came around on Sam's Town." Writing for MTV News, James Montgomery would theorize that the initial backlash to the album caused the band to change direction with their follow up album, Day & Age, calling the latter "the most un-Sam's Town album imaginable." Accolades Commercial performance Sam's Town debuted at number two on the US Billboard 200, selling 315,000 copies in its first week. , the album had sold 1.3 million copies in the United States. It became the band's second number-one album on the UK Albums Chart, selling 268,946 copies in its first week. It had sold 1.57 million copies in the United Kingdom by July 2017. The album has been certified Platinum or multi-Platinum in the US, UK, Australia, Canada, and Ireland. Sam's Town also produced multiple charting singles including the platinum chart-topping single "When You Were Young". , Sam's Town had sold almost five million copies worldwide. Popular culture Six months after the death of American YouTuber Technoblade, his father revealed on the r/technoblade subreddit that, in his son's instructions for the video that would announce his death, he included a link to a joint YouTube video of the songs Enterlude and Exitlude. Technoblade's father was unsure of how his